Package: autopkgtest Version: 5.28 Severity: wishlist Hi Simon et al,
this is a followup on https://lists.debian.org/[email protected]. Much of the time when one uses an autopkgtest backends, the user has few sets of useful backend options / configurations. Examples: * When using mmdebstrap-autopkgtest-build-qemu, one has to pass "--boot efi" as well as the image file name and often also --ram-size to the qemu backend. * For autopkgtest-virt-podman, it is common to pass --init=systemd. * autopkgtest-virt-ssh is not useful without --hostname and often more options are useful. If one manually invokes the autopkgtest command, there are quite a few convenience measures for specifying the tests to be run (.dsc / .changes / source directory / ...), but the backend configuration needs to be spelled out in detail. I consider this latter aspect inconvenient. A simple measure is adding custom scripts called autopkgtest-virt-something that simply execute an actual backend with those commonly used arguments to ~/bin or ~/.local/bin (something on $PATH). Such a script can be as simple as: $ cat ~/bin/autopkgtest-virt-qemusid #!/bin/sh exec autopkgtest-virt-qemu --boot=efi --ram-size=8192 --cpus=2 ~/path/to/image "$@" $ (Courtesy to Simon for providing this idea.) Another option would be for autopkgtest to provide an internal aliasing mechanism wherein the backed arguments could be specified in a configuration file. In this bug, I am asking for blessing the script-based approach by documenting it e.g. in man 1 autopkgtest or providing another way to record backend configuration via some user configurable mnemonic. Thanks for considering Helmut
